watchdogs

Gamers know Aiden Pearce as the tough-as-nails hacker. He’s dangerous with a gun and pummels thugs with his baton. When sneaking around, he peeks into a closed circuit security feeds for an edge. If he’s caught and being pursued, he activates roadblocks and switches around signal lights to wreck his pursuers.

But I bet that those eagerly awaiting Watch Dogs didn’t know he had a sister (Nicole) or a nephew (Jackson) or that there’s a tragedy as part of his backstory. That’s what I was introduced as I spent more than five hours with Ubisoft’s upcoming open world game. It was a small chunk of the campaign that offered a taste of what’s to come. Here are five things I noticed with my hands-on time:

When Watch Dogs was announced, it stunned audiences at E3. No one knew Ubisoft was working on another open-world game. It was great to see, but one nagging issue was that no one knew what it was exactly about. Sure, we had a general idea. As Aiden Pearce, players would be able to hack into an interconnected city profiling random citizens and manipulating the environment almost like magic. But what were the gameplay systems involved? What about its structure?

At a briefing this week in San Francisco, Ubisoft Montreal started shedding more light on the project and added more definition to the shape of Watch Dogs. From my initial hands-off impressions, it’s almost like a cross between Splinter Cell: Conviction and Assassin’s Creed. Senior producer Dominic Guay said the team had first started work on the project four and a half years ago.

They started with the new Disrupt engine that culls the best parts of the other Anvil and Dunia systems, both developed by Ubisoft Montreal. The combination of the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 3 engines lets the team create a dynamic world, one of the main pillars of Watch Dogs.